Portrait and Figure Study
Form – Drawing from life is the perfect means to develop your skills from observing to translation. The idea is similar to translating foreign languages, because with drawing, you are seeing an object in four dimensions (3-D plus time) and attempting to translate that to a 2-D experience. In the beginning, I teach seeing form in 4-D by drawing/painting still-lifes. By observing a still-life, artists can perceive the form, and draw it accurately, rather than with all the interpretations that we are prone to place on people. I do advise drawing live people too! But, the still-life provides an excellent inter-medium that shows off value, color, and shape very similar to heads and bodies of humans.
First Lesson: Draw/Paint Fruit Still-Life
Focus on creating a painting that represents the objects. In one sense, that is how to observe humans too. Drawing family members can be very frustrating for that reason – we do not see their faces, but what we think about their faces. Though this is very beautiful, too, and should be represented, I think the first focus is to paint as faithfully as our eye sees the object. By selecting that as our goal, we get our minds from mere recognition to observing the objects. Then we can paint them according to our observation.
Painting by our feelings has merit, but it describes something else happening in us. Painting through observation requires both visual and mental focus, and then the magic! of mixing appropriate values (dark/light) with hues.